Bill Lyon, the longtime columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, died Sunday at the age of 81.
My main memory of Lyon was an exchange he had with then-Temple coach John Chaney. Chaney had just won his 700th career game, so the post-game press conference was more crowded than a typical Temple-St. Bonaventure game. Near the end of the podcast, Chaney responded to a question (I think from Lyon) with a typical stream-of-conscious rant.
It’s a good thing you haven’t lost your passion, Lyon deadpanned. The press room cracked up, and Chaney rose from the table and pretended to storm out before laughing himself.
For someone who’s dream it was to write for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Lyon was one of the gold standards.
Mike Sielski, who counted Lyon as a mentor, writes:
The clarity of his thinking, of his values, was obvious if you observed him working. There’s an old adage in sportswriting, an aspiration born of too many games and events on too many nights when hard deadlines loom: Be faster than everyone who is better than you, or be better than everyone who is faster than you. That adage did not apply to Bill. He was faster andbetter. The words seemed to flow directly from his brain to the screen, with only the clacking thumps of his index fingers against the keyboard reminding you that, yes, there was some labor involved here and, no, the job wasn’t as easy as Bill made it appear.
He wrote about sports in a manner that revealed something about himself, about the way he viewed the world and conducted himself in it. We should always tell the truth, of course, but we should be tolerant of others’ failings. We should remember that there is more to life than sports. We should remember that sports, at its best, is a stage that puts the indomitability of the human spirit on display for all to see. We should remember that sports means nothing and everything at the very same time.